Hi everyone, I am having a bit of trouble with my wallet.dat file. Perhaps the issue is me (simple user error) or it could be more technical than that..

I always backup my wallet.dat file to a .7z with an aes256 password. Last time I touched my wallet.dat was on 1/21/2011. This morning I decided that I wanted to buy an item with my balance of 20.07 BTC but when I opened up my saved wallet.dat file, the balance was at 0! Am I doing something wrong? Attached is a screen shot of my client.

It says 26000 blocks, looking at blockexplorer you will see that this block appeared on 27. October 2009. This means that you will only be able to see payments in this block and previous. Since you made payments in 2011 you have to wait until you have downloaded enough blocks (a little less than 104000 blocks) to reach the date of your payment. Once blocks has been downloaded it will automatically appear in your balance.